Английская поэзия XIV–XX веков в современных русских переводах

I shall not see them sweating at that task:

It was too much of any man to ask;

The death that gets you certain, soon or late;

Meanwhile the mess, the mud, the noise, the hate.

But I shall see through bandages the white

Cheeks round the gun-barrel, and then night.

Was it cowardice from fight’s short shock to creep

Into a nightmare of eternal sleep;

My only fault that I misjudged my spirit

And volunteered, and now disgrace inherit?

Still will bombardment fill the noisy sky,

Still will old comrades fight and wonder why;

But soon they’ll join me — those that I out-raced,

Reaching the goal too early, and disgraced.

The flower of sleep will blow on either grave

And wheat frequent the coward as the brave,

Disliking only where the trenches ploughed

And ordnance delved, the fiery liquids flowed,

Where war’s red feet his wicked winepress trod,

An outrage on the peaceful hopes of God.

Arrived upon the downs of asphodel

I walked towards the military quarter

To find the sunburnt ghosts of allied soldiers

Killed on the Chersonese.

I met a band of palefaced weary men

Got up in old equipment. “Hi”, I said

‘Are you Gallipoli?’

And one, the leader, with a voice of gold,

Answered: “No. Ours, sir, was an older bungle.

We are Athenian hopltes who sat down

Before young Syracuse.

‘Need I recount our too-much-memoired end?

The hesitancy of our General Stuff,

The battle of the Harbour, where Hope fled

But we could not?

‘Not our disgrace in that”, the leader added,

‘But we are those proficient in the arts

Freed in return for the repeated verses

Of our Euripides.

‘Those honeyed words did not soothe Cerebrus’

(The leader grinned), ‘For sulky Charon hire

Deficient, and by Rhadamanthos ruled

No mitigation.

‘And yet with men, born victims of their ears

The chorus of the weeping Troades

Prevailed to gain the freedom of our limbs

And waft us back to Athens.

‘Through every corridor of this old barracks

We wander without friends; not fallen or

Survivors in a military sense:

Hence our disgrace’.

He turned; and as the rank mists took them in

They chanted of the God to Whom men pray,

Whether He be Compulsion, or All-Fathering,

Or Fate and blind.

High on a bough beneath the moonlight pale

That over-rated bird the nightingale

Sang and sang on. I thought my heart would break

At first, to feel again that forlorn ache

Across the waste of history — “Wine, Red Wine!”

Fitzgerald’s Nightingale, with voice divine,

Called out — “to stain my rose-love’s pale cheeks red!”

And Keats arose, among the wintry dead,

And testifies, his sunken eyes ashine —

The song; dusk; dream; and oozy eglantine!

But these are dead and dumb. This is a fowl

Hatched from an ordinary egg. The owl

Like generation owneth. The world wags

And from a pure tropism the small bird brags,

His vocal cords to something in the air

Reacting, never of the spring aware,

While still more passive, dumb and deaf and blind

Keats and Fitzgerald slumber, clay-confined;

Close-hugged by greedy earth, whose barren vales

Nurse for one Keats a billion nightingales.